Do Spider Webs Hold they Key to Clean Water?
About a billion people worldwide suffer from a lack of clean water. In order to help alleviate this global problem, the British engineering firm Arup and poverty relief charity WaterAid invited engineers to present their solutions. The prize-winning entry, called WatAir, was developed by a team of Israeli architects. The team derived the model’s foundations from nature. The spider web, they observed, has an impeccable ability to gather moisture, condensing water vapor into droplets of liquid water. Their design captures water vapor from the air and coverts it into water. It is then processed through an onboard filter. Since the contest, the developers have built a prototype model. A simple canvas, 10 meters in diameter and held up by ropes tied to trees, extracted 20 liters of water from the air. Canvas, to be sure, is not the ideal material for water extraction. The team is currently seeking improved materials which can more efficiently harvest the available water vapor. This method o
